Gijs Dreijer

Gijs is a first year doctoral student working on Professor Maria Fusaro's ERC funded AveTransRisk project, focussing on the development of general averages (GA) in the Southern Netherlands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By researching GA, he hopes to uncover change and continuity in the legal framework in the Southern Netherlands during the later Medieval Period. Within the project, he will thus tackle the legal side of GA and, as a result, Gijs is also partly based at the Faculty of Law and Criminology at the Free University of Brussels under the supervision of Professor Dave De ruysscher.

Gijs completed both his BA (with Honours) and Research MA (cum laude) at Leiden University in The Netherlands (his home country), mainly focusing on private trade and smuggling within several chartered companies in the Low Countries. For his MA thesis, written under the supervision of Professor Catia Antunes, Gijs wrote an analysis of the circumstances in which the Ostend Company (1722-1727) could be founded, based on six distinct archives in three European countries. Besides his interests in business history, topics such as the Great Divergence and early modern globalization have always sparked his specific interests.